Feeling This: Tatsuro Yamashita, Timothée Chalamet in a Rare GQ Hoodie, and More

Hello friends, and welcome to the first installment of Feeling This, a new Friday column about cool stuff we came across this week. I'm Chris and I edit GQ.com. Admittedly, this is omega-level flagrant biting: Not so long ago I was a fan of the big homie Matt Schnipper's old Fader column, Slept-On, and I've always wanted to conscript some of that energy on GQ.com, to create a space where our enthusiasms that don't fit neatly into the usual content buckets can live. Good music, good reads, good pants—things that aren't necessarily worth a post on their own but we feel good about sharing. In a way, consider it counter-programming to the immediacy of the Twitter and Instagram churn, a way to slow down and and let things digest a bit. (And also to link back to some of the stuff we did this week that we're proud of at New (Nü?) GQ.)

ONTO THE CONTENT.

Whenever I've needed to really strap in and work lately, I've found myself returning to a small rotation of City Pop playlists—inoffensive '70s and '80s-ish soft disco from Japan that has since been adopted as cool by the SoundCloud vaporwave kids, like Birkenstocks and not having sex. As far as work music goes it's perfect for tricking yourself into some semblance of a flow state, especially if you happen to be the kind of dumb oaf who took four years of high school Japanese and forgot everything short of "can I please use the bathroom Keiko Sensei." A lot of the City Pop heavyweights are conspicuously absent from Spotify and Apple Music, so to YouTube we go for the likes of, say, Tatsuro Yamashita, a low-key style god and super-producer who put out some tasty jams as a solo artist. From 1982's murderously funky For You, which came in the middle of a multi-album hot streak:

While the rest of the culture was obsessed with the harder phylums of American and British rock, Yamashita leaned into his own brand of beachy anodyne dadpop—per Redbull Music Academy, one of his former guitarists said "[he] taught me that rock & roll could be played in a major 7th"—cresting with a Billy Mackish Christmas smash called "Christmas Eve" that's sort of equivalent to "Last Christmas" stateside. When it comes to the kind of straightforward feel-good pop songs you'd secretly toe-tap to in the Macy's shoe aisle the man is just an animal.

Also today in big hoodie energy: below we have Timmy chal-chal-Chalamet in the rare GQ hoodie, designed by first ballot GQ hall-of-famer Griffin Funk, who deserves to have his jersey retired in the Conde rafters. As far as blessed images go this is our Lady of Guadalupe.

Other reads: over at HuffPo I enjoyed the surgical precision of Ashley Feinberg's interview with drop crotch enthusiast and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey (fun thought exercise: Are you smarter than a tech billionaire?). This Verge story about what it's like to play as a black character in Red Dead Redemption is terrific and raises the right kind of troubling questions. And meanwhile, BuzzFeed News should start clearing out some space on the Pulitzer shelf with its reporting on the president and Michael Cohen, who was directed to lie in front of Congress about Trump's involvement with Trump Tower Moscow.